The Last Days of Stalin by Joshua Rubenstein

A gripping look at the power struggles after the Red Tsar’s death

At around 10pm, on Sunday, March 1, 1953, the housekeeper at Joseph Stalin’s
dacha outside Moscow found her boss lying unconscious on the floor, his
pyjamas drenched in urine.

The Soviet leader usually rose at midday and alerted his bodyguards that he
was awake. But they had heard no sound, he had not asked for breakfast and
had not summoned his secretaries as he normally did. If his staff were
suspicious that something was amiss, they knew better than to disturb the
irascible old despot.

The guards lifted Stalin back into bed; one rang the Kremlin. Within an hour,
his three most senior magnates had arrived: Lavrenti Beria, the tyrant’s
executioner-in- chief, who had organised his master’s purges from the 1930s
onwards; Nikita Khrushchev, the general dogsbody who handled Communist party
affairs; and the obese, pasty-faced bureaucrat Georgy Malenkov, in charge of
day-to-day government.